From Liberty Cabbage to Freedom Fries

Like many twenty-something liberals, I suppose, until the
fall of 2001 when the advent of the War on Terror put a final
end to any lingering vestiges of the Long Boom, my political
ethics were largely a matter of faith. Raised by moderate
parents and educated in schools where leftist catchphrases
(for my circle of friends) held something like the status
of pep-rally slogans, my political views consisted largely
of a laundry-list of government dos and don’ts, cobbled
together from the rhetoric of Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky, bell
hooks, and various NPR personalities. I knew that the government
should spend more on schools and less on defense, that the
war on drugs was wrongheaded, that big corporations got away
with murder and that the environment needed saving.

Although I knew these things, the ethical underpinning of
my liberalism was not a subject that I ever much questioned.
Or more accurately, it was a question that never arose in
a particularly forceful way. And then, with September 11 –
and even more acutely when the United States went to war against
Iraq – the issue reared its head in a manner that could
not be ignored. And to many liberals like myself, more than
any other events in recent history these two moments made
clear that the American political left is experiencing an
ethical crisis, an internal schism over priorities and beliefs
that has called into question what it means to be a liberal.

The nature of this crisis was illustrated by Salon.com editor
Edward Lempinen when he wrote, in a recent article on the
war against Iraq, “it sometimes seems that the left
is so averse to war, especially war waged by America, that
it is prepared to turn a blind eye to even the most ghastly
realities.” It is this crisis that is largely responsible
for the inability of the American left to meaningfully address
the events surrounding September 11, and that is revealed
in almost every conversation about the war against Iraq among
liberals when someone says: “I know Saddam is a terrible
dictator, but…” and then proceeds to list a catalogue
of U.S. hypocrisies and blunders.

What is Liberty? What is Freedom?

By an odd coincidence, the origins of the ethical schism
dividing the American left are reflected in two gestures of
American defiance via culinary nomenclature. On March 11,
2003, a sign appeared beside cash registers in the Longsworth
Cafeteria in Washington, D.C. informing customers that within
the establishment French fries would henceforth be known as
“Freedom Fries.” It was, as U.S. Representative
Bob Ney said, “a small but symbolic effort to show the
strong displeasure of many on Capitol Hill with the actions
of our so-called ally, France” in opposing the U.S.-led
war against Iraq. Similarly, during World War I in response
to anti-German public feeling mobilized by Woodrow Wilson’s
Committee of Public Information (which distributed pictures
of the Evil Hun), the condiment formerly known as sauerkraut
became known as “Liberty Cabbage.” This shift
– in the use of “liberty” to that of “freedom”
as an article of self-description – provides a framework
for understanding the crisis of the modern left.

Historically, the English language got “liberty”
from the Norman-French liberté and the Latin
libertas, abstract nouns which also gave us “liberal”
and “liberate.” In medieval history, we can follow
the course of libertates, privileges granted by sovereigns
to nobles and landed gentry, which in the 17th century became
the basis for a generalized notion of liberty. “Freedom,”
on the other hand, is a word with Germanic origins: frijon
(to love), freis (free) and freihals (freedom),
all of which carry the connotation of “without restraint”
or “at will.” As far as philology goes, liberty
is a privilege granted to individuals while freedom is what
arises from the absence of external restrictions.

The difference between liberty and freedom was formalized
by John Stuart Mill in his distinction between “positive”
and “negative” freedom. According to Mill, negative
freedom is the elimination of restraints on individuals; my
freedom from mandatory military service, for example, is a
negative freedom. If negative freedom is freedom from, positive
freedom is freedom to: the empowerment of individuals to realize
their goals or needs. Unlike negative freedoms, which result
from governments leaving people alone to do what they want,
positive freedoms stem from rights that are granted to citizens
by a government and typically depend on our following a set
of rules. Unemployment insurance and Social Security are examples
of positive freedom.

Of course, negative and positive freedoms often depend on
each other. My freedom from discrimination (a negative freedom)
is only meaningful if I also have the right to find redress
for discrimination in court (a positive freedom). Still, the
distinction between these two flavors of freedom is an important
one, particularly in ethical terms.

Ethically, as far as negative freedom is concerned, almost
all roads lead to relativism. This is because if freedom is
defined as the absence of restrictions, then any absolute
ethical standard becomes a violation of that freedom. Only
the ideals of positive freedom, which require a decision about
which negative freedoms will be limited for the greater good,
can lead to an ethic of social justice that goes beyond simply
allowing individuals to live unmolested. After all, any effort
for social justice must begin – as Jefferson began the
American democratic experiment – with the assertion
and defense of truths.

The ethical split within the American political left has
corresponded largely with the spread of relativism. A distrust
of positive freedom is nothing new in American history, but
the decades since the start of the Cold War have seen a dramatic
decrease in the faith of Americans that governments can do
good – in Mill’s terms, a rejection of the possibilities
of positive freedom. Politically, this movement may have its
roots in the fact that in the same way Libertarians advocate
an extreme version of negative freedom, Communists stand for
an extreme application of positive-freedom ideals. (It was
this fact that led Isaiah Berlin and other thinkers to conclude
that positive freedom ideals often paved the road to totalitarianism.
As Berlin pointed out, at the heart of the Fascist and Communist
projects was a determination to use political power to liberate
human beings whether they liked it or not.)

Today, the Republican Party has cast itself as the defender
of negative freedom in the United States. It is the logic
of negative freedom that unites the Republican support of
the 4th amendment, the reduction of government size, and the
rhetoric of “choice” that is employed by Republicans
in favor of privatization. Republican fiscal policy bills
itself as “free trade,” the economic application
of negative freedom.
The most vocal advocate of relativism has not, however, been
the Republican Party; it has been the intellectual left. Consider
two examples: first, most of the contemporary academic figures
who have been influential on the political left (think Barthes,
Derrida, etc.) have argued against the possibility of a single,
authoritative truth or interpretation for the world. Their
emphasis on individual contexts and readings rather than shared
experiences forms a philosophic justification for relativism
and the ideals of negative freedom.

Second, consider the practical applications of multiculturalism,
an iconic cause for the American left. Multiculturalism arose
to expand the freedom of individuals to live outside a painfully
restrictive idea of social norms. In the real world, this
happens through the elimination of laws and mores restricting
acceptable behaviors – a textbook example of negative
freedom ideals. More loudly than any other group, the mainstream
intellectual left has implored liberals in America not to
do each other the violence of absolutism, the violence of
interpretation.

A Global Sense of Social Justice

This brings us – circuitously – back to the
ethical schism of the contemporary American left. In political
terms, relativism is invoked most often, and most easily,
and the national level. This goes: “I am good liberal
because I understand that over in [insert place name], [insert
harmless example of cultural difference], and I choose not
to pass judgment because for them it means something different.”
(For example, try “Papua New Guinea,” and “coming-of-age
rituals for boys involve performing fellatio on older men.”)
Because of this, it is around foreign policy decisions that
the ethical demands of relativism are most acutely felt, accompanying
fears of colonialism and cross-cultural misinterpretation
(the new bogeyman of the American left).

During much of the Long Boom, American political debate focused
on domestic policy issues. For a number of years, this allowed
the ethical conflicts of relativism to lie dormant. Since
the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks however, the existence
of a world larger than North America has impressed itself
on American political consciousness. And confronted with issues
of foreign policy that demand a response, the ethical contradictions
in the American left have become impossible to ignore.

Simply, the widespread acceptance of relativism as a guiding
principle in leftist thought has made it difficult for American
liberals to formulate an ethics – particularly an international
ethics – of positive freedom that does not involve contradiction
and hypocrisy. The fact that the comments made by the American
political left regarding the War on Terror and the war against
Iraq have been couched in almost entirely negative terms is
a symptom of this ethical confusion. Similarly, the phrase
“I know Saddam is a terrible dictator, but –”
is not simply about the weighing of a greater evil against
Saddam’s; it also evokes the sense of uncertainty, of
unwillingness to judge others, that relativism has taught
liberals is key to being an ethical person.

Of course, the difficulty of reconciling relativism with positive
freedom ethics is hardly confined to the American political
left. Even the Bush administration, that bastion of “moral
clarity,” seems ethically confused; at least one reason
why Bush’s explanations for the need to fight a war
against Iraq have seemed so garbled is that they slip and
fumble between positive-freedom explanations (human rights)
and negative-freedom ones (self-defense), and in the process
lose much of their power. The political left, however, has
been affected by the rise of relativism far more seriously
than the right, if only because the right traditionally represents
negative freedoms (smaller government, less legislation) while
the left’s iconic achievements and purpose center on
social empowerment via institutions of positive freedom.

In the face of this dilemma, what’s a liberal to do?
The understanding and appreciation for difference that relativism
provides is too important ignore; relativism cannot simply
be discarded. At the same time, it is important to remember
that positivism and intervention are also part of the tradition
of liberalism. During the Spanish Civil War, leftist intellectuals
and artists from around the world took up both metaphorical
and literal arms against Franco in the name of civil rights,
and later (eventually) supported World War II as a humanitarian
struggle.

This is not to suggest that the political left should support
the war against Iraq: there are excellent reasons why it should
not. Instead, the significant point is that the left has failed
to offer any meaningful alternative to the war at all. For
example, if anti-war protesters are motivated by concern for
the Iraqi public (as many claim) and if Saddam Hussein is
a brutal dictator (as is broadly acknowledged), where are
the marches to help the people of Iraq, to deal with
the tyrant in non-military ways? The fact that there are not
reveals the relativism at the core of the liberal position:
“it’s terrible, but who am I to pass judgment?
They’ve left us alone, so let’s leave them alone.”
(A mantra that sounds more like indifference each time it’s
repeated.)

In the same way that the political left has done little more
than condemn the war against Iraq, the left has failed to
address the core issues of the War on Terror. Leftists have
grumbled about loss of civil liberties, but no real alternative
to the Republican logic – “we fight terrorists
by bombing them” – has emerged. Where are the
liberals arguing that, say, providing education and addressing
economic inequality may be a better means of fighting the
root causes of terrorism than cruise missiles and listening
posts? It is as if the political left has turned its back
on foreign policy for reasons of “cultural sensitivity.”

Ironically, in an increasingly interconnected world a global
sense of justice is what the political left needs most. Despite
the protests of a few, globalization is bound to continue.
The spread of the Internet, as well as new global communication
and transportation technologies, will lead trans-national
organizations like the UN, WTO, and IMF, to play a role of
growing importance in shaping the ways we live. Without a
willingness to deal in international terms, there is no means
for understanding or working with such international organizations.

Some groups, like Greenpeace and Amnesty International, have
been remarkably successful at developing a global vision and
adopting global tactics. On the whole however, most liberals
– and in particular mainstream liberal politics –
have failed to do so, or have done so in largely negative
terms. To simply complain about the existence of organizations
like the WTO (or to embrace isolationism, as many unions have
done) is to miss the point: to remain relevant, the American
political left must address foreign policy issues rather than
hiding its collective head in the sand. And ultimately, such
a sense of global justice will need to spring from a reconciliation
of relativism and the need for basic human liberties that
transcend national boundaries.